Another Hurdle In BSNL’s Rural WiMax Roll-out
Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd’s WiMax project has suffered a blow with its (BSNL’s) internal vigilance officer putting a stay on giving the project to one of the four shortlisted bidders. BSNL had received bids for its WiMax tender in November 2009. Earlier, BSNL had to cancel the tender twice.
Vippalamritha Magnetic Components Ltd (VMC), a Hyderabad based company, fourth lowest bidder for the project, would be first interrogated for averred non-payment of duties by its parent company while importing equipment for an earlier BSNL contract. Prithvi Information Solution, the parent company of VMC, has been served a show cause notice by the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence.
“Since the investigation in this case is going on, it was requested that no order should be placed at this juncture with VMC,” stated an internal BSNL note.
The allegations however, have been vehemently rebutted by the Company on grounds that a wrong interpretation of rules is causing this temporary hitch. VMC has told BSNL that similar recovery notices had been issued by DRI to other telecom players, which were subsequently stayed by the courts.
BSNL’s WiMax roll out plans may again hit a rough weather although the PSU has the option of giving the contract to the Spanco-Samsung alliance, which is the next lowest bidder after VMC. Sources suggested that the Samsung-Spanco combine is keen to match Gemini’s bid price of Rs 983 crore. But nothing is confirmed and we will have to wait until investigations against VMC and Prithvi are completed.
Chennai-based Gemini Communications, Chinese equipment maker ZTE, and the US-based Harris Stratex were the other vendors that had emerged the lowest bidders for the supply of 7,000 WiMax base stations to BSNL in the rural areas.
A total of seven companies had put in their bids for the project, of which the lowest four were to be picked for the contract. The State-owned company plans to buy 7,000 WiMax base stations to set up Common Service Centres (CSC) across the country. The project is estimated to be around Rs 1,500 crore.The project envisages covering 2.5 lakh blocks across the country, whereby BSNL wants to set up Common Service Centres.
The PSU had planned to roll out WiMax in three phases. Phase-I was the setting up of broadband infrastructure in the rural areas for which the bids had opened on August 25. In the second phase, BSNL planned to roll out broadband infrastructure in the urban areas. For this, Huawei has been selected for rolling out services in Punjab and Harris Sratex has got the contract for Kerala. Tenders for other urban areas were floated later. The third project is based on the franchisee model.
For those of you, who still do not know, WiMax, Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access, is a telecommunication technology that provides wireless transmission of data using a variety of transmission modes, from point-to-multi point links to portable and fully mobile internet access. WiMax is a limited area wireless internet connectivity service, wherein users can access high speed internet. It is similar to Wi-Fi service, but the radius of WiMax service is larger.
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